Artist Oil Colors

We will take you through the extensive palette of earth colors offered in Williamsburg Oil paints, breaking down the differences between natural, mined pigments, and colors that have been synthesized. Explore the texture, transparency and utility of these colors in your painting!

The drying time chart referenced in this video can be found here: https://goldenhub.goldenpaints.com/storage/uploads/williamsburg-drytime-chart-091818.pdf

For a listing of all our colors categorized by their relative grind (very fine to coarse) see this list from our website: https://goldenhub.goldenpaints.com/storage/uploads/grind-category-pdf-1.pdf​

Check your local retailer for Williamsburg New Neutral Gray Set based on the Munsell Color System, helps you adjust value and chroma of any color without altering hue. Take a quick look at the creation and use of neutral gray colors within the Williamsburg palette and explore neutralizing colors while preserving value using the Munsell color system as well Grisaille, the practice of underpainting in grayscale then applying color glazes.

Find the Munsell data for every color in the Williamsburg palette here.

Getting the proper pigment is just the beginning. So much of the quality of oil paint is in the grinding. Each color is ground to enhance the beauty and luminosity specific to that particular pigment. Some colors will feel slightly gritty; others extremely smooth. Our Cerulean Blue will have a beautiful velvet, light-absorbing surface with an extremely strong covering power; our Siennas will often be chunky or gritty to allow light to travel through the vehicle, exposing rich golden or mahogany undertones instead of just heavy, dull browns.

Pigments are ground in pure, premium, alkali-refined linseed oil and made in batches no larger than eight gallons at a time. This gives us total control over the product, much like the late nineteenth-century French color makers. All the materials are hand measured, and every ounce of paint is scrutinized. The paint is packed in 37 ml and 150 ml non-reactive aluminum tubes. Larger quantities of paint are packed in aluminum cans using only the purest materials.

Williamsburg Artist Oil Colors are used by the world's finest artists whose work can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Beaubourg in Paris.